Monge-Nájera Julián
Rev Biol Trop. 2014 Mar;62(1):9-13.
Use of the Impact Factor is currently being discarded in industrialized countries where, to name one case, up to 40% of the articles published in Nature are never cited, despite the high Impact Factor of that journal. However, it is still used in Latin America to evaluate journals and authors, potentially influencing who are given positions and who receives funding. To find out how valid the Impact Factor is for Latin American research, 1 used the database BINABITROP to see how much of the relevant literature was used to measure impact. I found that the Science Citation Index (SCI) excluded 96% of the relevant literature when measuring the impact of biological articles about Costa Rica for the studied year (2011). Therefore, the impact of Latin American science is unknown and the Impact Factor should not be used to assess how often a journal, institution or author are cited.
在工业化国家，影响因子的使用目前正被摒弃。仅举一例，尽管《自然》杂志的影响因子很高，但该杂志上发表的文章中有高达40%从未被引用过。然而，在拉丁美洲，它仍被用于评估期刊和作者，这可能会影响到谁能获得职位以及谁能获得资助。为了弄清楚影响因子对拉丁美洲研究的有效性如何，我使用了BINABITROP数据库来查看有多少相关文献被用于衡量影响力。我发现，在衡量2011年所研究的关于哥斯达黎加生物学文章的影响力时，科学引文索引（SCI）排除了96%的相关文献。因此，拉丁美洲科学的影响力尚不清楚，且不应使用影响因子来评估期刊、机构或作者被引用的频率。
